“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”

Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”

The piece of writing (via) which that quote introduces is intellectually substantial, but not all that difficult to read, so you might as well take a look at it yourself. Most of the news media seems to be losing their minds over Wikileaks without actually reading these essays, even though he describes the function and aims of an organization like Wikileaks in pretty straightforward terms. But, to summarize, he begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. The metaphor of a computing network is mostly implicit, but utterly crucial: he seeks to oppose the power of the state by treating it like a computer and tossing sand in its diodes.

He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself — to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known — it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy:

Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.

The problem this creates for the government conspiracy then becomes the organizational problem it must solve: if the conspiracy must operate in secrecy, how is it to communicate, plan, make decisions, discipline itself, and transform itself to meet new challenges? The answer is: by controlling information flows. After all, if the organization has goals that can be articulated, articulating them openly exposes them to resistance. But at the same time, failing to articulate those goals to itself deprives the organization of its ability to process and advance them. Somewhere in the middle, for the authoritarian conspiracy, is the right balance of authority and conspiracy.

His model for imagining the conspiracy, then, is not at all the cliché that people mean when they sneer at someone for being a “conspiracy theorist.” After all, most the “conspiracies” we’re familiar with are pure fantasies, and because the “Elders of Zion” or James Bond’s SPECTRE have never existed, their nonexistence becomes a cudgel for beating on people that would ever use the term or the concept. For Assange, by contrast, a conspiracy is something fairly banal, simply any network of associates who act in concert by hiding their concerted association from outsiders, an authority that proceeds by preventing its activities from being visible enough to provoke counter-reaction. It might be something as dramatic as a loose coalition of conspirators working to start a war with Iraq/n, or it might simply be the banal, everyday deceptions and conspiracies of normal diplomatic procedure.

He illustrates this theoretical model by the analogy of a board with nails hammered into it and then tied together with twine:

First take some nails (“conspirators”) and hammer them into a board at random. Then take twine (“communication”) and loop it from nail to nail without breaking. Call the twine connecting two nails a link. Unbroken twine means it is possible to travel from any nail to any other nail via twine and intermediary nails…Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy, others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between important sections or groupings of the conspiracy…

Conspirators are often discerning, for some trust and depend each other, while others say little. Important information flows frequently through some links, trivial information through others. So we expand our simple connected graph model to include not only links, but their “importance.”

Return to our board-and-nails analogy. Imagine a thick heavy cord between some nails and fine light thread between others. Call the importance, thickness or heaviness of a link its weight. Between conspirators that never communicate the weight is zero. The “importance” of communication passing through a link is difficult to evaluate apriori, since its true value depends on the outcome of the conspiracy. We simply say that the “importance” of communication contributes to the weight of a link in the most obvious way; the weight of a link is proportional to the amount of important communication flowing across it. Questions about conspiracies in general won’t require us to know the weight of any link, since that changes from conspiracy to conspiracy.

Such a network will not be organized by a flow chart, nor would it ever produce a single coherent map of itself (without thereby hastening its own collapse). It is probably fairly acephalous, as a matter of course: if it had a single head (or a singular organizing mind which could survey and map the entirety), then every conspirator would be one step from the boss and a short two steps away from every other member of the conspiracy. A certain amount of centralization is necessary, in other words (otherwise there is no conspiracy), but too much centralization makes the system vulnerable.

To use The Wire as a ready-to-hand example, imagine if Avon Barksdale was communicating directly with Bodie. All you would ever have to do is turn one person — any person — and you would be one step away from the boss, whose direct connection to everyone else in the conspiracy would allow you to sweep them all up at once. Obviously, no effective conspiracy would ever function this way. Remember Stringer Bell’s “is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?” To function effectively, the primary authority has to be disassociated from all other members of the conspiracy, layers of mediation which have to be as opaque as possible to everyone concerned (which a paper trail unhelpfully clarifies). But while the complexity of these linkages shield the directing authority from exposure, they also limit Avon Barksdale’s ability to control what’s going on around him. Businesses run on their paperwork! And the more walls you build around him, the less he might be able to trust his lieutenants, and the less they’ll require (or tolerate) him.

This, Assange reasons, is a way to turn a feature into a bug. And his underlying insight is simple and, I think, compelling: while an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to “think” as a system, to communicate with itself. The more conspiratorial it becomes, in a certain sense, the less effective it will be as a conspiracy. The more closed the network is to outside intrusion, the less able it is to engage with that which is outside itself (true hacker theorizing).

His thinking is not quite as abstract as all that, of course; as he quite explicitly notes, he is also understanding the functioning of the US state by analogy with successful terrorist organizations. If you’ve seen The Battle of Algiers, for example, think of how the French counter-terrorist people work to produce an organizational flow chart of the Algerian resistance movement: since they had overwhelming military superiority, their inability to crush the FLN resided in their inability to find it, an inability which the FLN strategically works to impede by decentralizing itself. Cutting off one leg of the octopus, the FLN realized, wouldn’t degrade the system as a whole if the legs all operated independently. The links between the units were the vulnerable spots for the system as a whole, so those were most closely and carefully guarded and most hotly pursued by the French. And while the French won the battle of Algiers, they lost the war, because they adopted the tactics Assange briefly mentions only to put aside:

How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act?…We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnapping, blackmailing or otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to.

This is the US’s counterterrorism strategy — find the men in charge and get ’em — but it’s not what Assange wants to do: such a program would isolate a specific version of the conspiracy and attempt to destroy the form of it that already exists, which he argues will have two important limitations. For one thing, by the time such a conspiracy has a form which can be targeted, its ability to function will be quite advanced. As he notes:

“A man in chains knows he should have acted sooner for his ability to influence the actions of the state is near its end. To deal with powerful conspiratorial actions we must think ahead and attack the process that leads to them since the actions themselves can not be dealt with.”

By the time a cancer has metastasized, in other words, antioxidents are no longer effective, and even violent chemotherapy is difficult. It’s better, then, to think about how conspiracies come into existence so as to prevent them from forming in the first place (whereas if you isolate the carcinogen early enough, you don’t need to remove the tumor after the fact). Instead, he wants to address the aggregative process itself, by impeding the principle of its reproduction: rather than trying to expose and cut particular links between particular conspirators (which does little to prevent new links from forming and may not disturb the actual functioning of the system as a whole), he wants to attack the “total conspiratorial power” of the entire system by figuring out how to reduce its total ability to share and exchange information among itself, in effect, to slow down its processing power. As he puts it:

Conspiracies are cognitive devices. They are able to outthink the same group of individuals acting alone Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass through the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).

Because he thinks of the conspiracy as a computational network, he notes in an aside that one way to weaken its cognitive ability would be to degrade the quality of its information:

Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer’s aphorism is sometimes called “the Fox News effect”.

I’m not sure this is what he means, but it’s worth reflecting that the conspiracy’s ability to deceive others through propaganda can also be the conspiracy’s tendency to deceive itself by its own propaganda. So many people genuinely drink the Kool-Aid, after all. Would our super-spies in Afghanistan ever have been so taken in by the imposter Taliban guy if they didn’t, basically, believe their own line of propaganda, if they didn’t convince themselves — even provisionally — that we actually are winning the war against Talibothra? The same is true of WMD; while no one in possession of the facts could rationally conclude that Saddam Hussein then (or Iran now) are actually, positively in pursuit of WMD’s, this doesn’t mean that the people talking about ticking time bombs don’t actually believe that they are. It just means they are operating with bad information about the environment. Sometimes this works in their favor, but sometimes it does not: if Obama thinks Afghanistan is winnable, it may sink his presidency, for example, while the belief of his advisors that the economy would recover if the government rescued only the banks almost certainly lost the midterm elections for the Democrats (and was the death-knell for so many of the Blue Dogs who were driving that particular policy choice). Whether this actually hurts the conspiracy is unclear; those Blue Dogs might have lost their seats, but most of them will retire from public service to cushy jobs supported by the sectors they supported while they were in public service. And lots of successful politicians do nothing but fail.

This is however, not where Assange’s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire:

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. Even if all the elements of the conspiracy still exist, in this sense, depriving themselves of a vigorous flow of information to connect them all together as a conspiracy prevents them from acting as a conspiracy. As he puts it:

If total conspiratorial power is zero, then clearly there is no information flow between the conspirators and hence no conspiracy. A substantial increase or decrease in total conspiratorial power almost always means what we expect it to mean; an increase or decrease in the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and adapt…An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think is powerless to preserve itself against the opponents it induces.

In this sense, most of the media commentary on the latest round of leaks has totally missed the point. After all, why are diplomatic cables being leaked? These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.

Early responses seem to indicate that Wikileaks is well on its way to accomplishing some of its goals. As Simon Jenkins put it (in a great piece in its own right) “The leaks have blown a hole in the framework by which states guard their secrets.” And if the diplomats quoted by Le Monde are right that, “we will never again be able to practice diplomacy like before,” this is exactly what Wikileaks was trying to do. It’s sort of pathetic hearing diplomats and government shills lament that the normal work of “diplomacy” will now be impossible, like complaining that that the guy boxing you out is making it hard to get rebounds. Poor dears. If Assange is right to point out that his organization has accomplished more state scrutiny than the entire rest of the journalistic apparatus combined, he’s right but he’s also deflecting the issue: if Wikileaks does some of the things that journalists do, it also does some very different things. Assange, as his introductory remarks indicate quite clearly, is in the business of “radically shift[ing] regime behavior.”

If Wikileaks is a different kind of organization than anything we’ve ever seen before, it’s interesting to see him put himself in line with more conventional progressivism. Assange isn’t off base, after all, when he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people,” and it was true, then too, that “To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.” Assange is trying to shit all over this unholy alliance in ways that the later and more radical Roosevelt would likely have commended.

It’s worth closing, then, by recalling that Roosevelt also coined the term “muckraker,” and that he did so as a term of disparagement. Quoting from Pilgrim’s Progress, he cited the example of the “Muck-Raker” who could only look down, whose perspective was so totally limited to the “muck” that it was his job to rake, he had lost all ability to see anything higher. Roosevelt, as always, is worth quoting:

In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muckrake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor…the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is s vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil. There are, in the body politic, economic, and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful…

Roosevelt was many things when he uttered those words, but he was not wrong. There is a certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing, particularly when it’s uttered by the guy who’s busily monetizing your radical transparency. And the way most journalists “expose” secrets as a professional practice — to the extent that they do — is just as narrowly selfish: because they publicize privacy only when there is profit to be made in doing so, they keep their eyes on the valuable muck they are raking, and learn to pledge their future professional existence on a continuing and steady flow of it. In muck they trust.

According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary.

This to me seems by orders of magnitude more insightful than all the shallow analysis and gossipy peek-a-boo I've read that the mainstream corporate press of professional journalists has managed on the subject.

Assange has a higher purpose and is more- and at the same time less- subversive than he is given credit for. Wikileaks is a brilliant, audacious and ultimately correct response to a machine that seeks to control our perceptions to its own benefit and frequently to our own harm by distorting and limiting the information in the public domain.

Post by bjd on Dec 1, 2010 20:40:56 GMT

Indeed -- it's certainly better as an explanation of what Wikileaks is doing than all the insults and "the end of diplomacy as we know it".

One of the things I thought of when the first recent leaks came out, was "how much misery would have been prevented if something like Wikileaks had been around in the 20th century? How many small countries/peoples would not have been used as pawns in games between more powerful countries?"

I wonder too how many secret and not-so-secret services are out to find Julian Assange.

Post by kerouac2 on Dec 1, 2010 21:45:26 GMT

I have strangely conflicting views of what is happening. My French half sort of wants to support the (mild) indignation of my American half. A lot of the outed documents are pathetic, ridiculous and insulting. But diplomacy (which the French turned into an 'art' -- hence all of the French terminology in diplomatic affairs: "chargé d'affaires, attaché, liaison...") is the profession of transforming one's convictions into an acceptable compromise. If these dumb asses can't write frankly what they think to the powers back home, their analyses can't be transformed into something palatable by more intelligent people. That is what is likely to be the outcome of this situation: the 'diplomats' will become tongue tied from fear of having their statements exposed, so no real information will get back to the home country (mixed with all of the usual bullshit of course). If people stop speaking frankly in order to be politically correct at all times, global ignorance and risk of tragic incidents will increase.

I would prefer to be optimistic and say that this will simply lead to a better class of diplomats being recruited, who will do a better job, but I just know that it is not going to happen.

Post by fumobici on Dec 1, 2010 23:11:32 GMT

Did you read the piece K2? The purpose is explicitly to throw sand in the gears (I think Assange used a diode metaphor) of the machine in order to narrow the circle of privileged communications and effect a more open and informed dialog outside the closed world policy is formulated and implemented in. This isn't about the contents of the leaks, but the lines of communication within the machine used to control political perceptions and coordinate the conscious dissemination of disinformation.

I was skeptical of their motivations too, but I now see the logic behind the effort. The interests of those in power are frequently in conflict with our own and I see this effort as perhaps the best hope we currently have for setting the balance right.

Post by kerouac2 on Dec 2, 2010 6:16:54 GMT

Yes, I read it, but it is just not going to happen and may become counter productive. Overuse of the word conspiracy already indicates that the writer hass failed to grasp the magnitude of the situation. A conspiracy cannot operate with tens of thousands of people, as it implies plotting together -- these imbeciles are spouting their drivel in different corners of the world without coordination. Hardly a conspiracy! The only conspiracy in operation is the one by Wikileaks, but its goal is skewed. To be effective, Assange and friends should have concentrated on just a few targets rather than "everything at random."

Post by myrt on Dec 2, 2010 7:46:26 GMT

It's too early in the morning for me to assimilate this properly but I will reread it as it's seems a very interesting insight/explanation into what's happening atm. I think the current furore is fascinating. If there is any justification needed for the existence of the internet it's this! I sincerely believe that we are manipulated, exploited and generally led by the nose by a relatively few governments/organisations/corporations in the world at large and their corrupt and thoroughly unpleasant motives and objectives are the driving force behind the major conflicts going on around the globe. Anyone who exposes the way these few who run the industrialised world is to be applauded and the ridiculous and hysterical reactions to the current batch of leaks simply illustrates how we have all bought into the lies and propaganda promulgated by all those engaged in the 'conspiracy', for want of a better word. That implies some kind of worldwide unifying objective, which is not the case, as K2 says. Probably the only seriously unifying factor is the desire for power, wealth and control of the masses - by whatever method works. The ongoing huge loss of life, environmental damage and disruption of cultures etc etc is the price we pay for our willingness, as individuals, in allowing ourselves to accept the lies, half truths and evasions which currently permeate our governments and civic lives. Apathy, ignorance and feelings of helplessness may be a way of life for most of us but the resourceful individuals who are engaged in the fight back have my total admiration. I hope they can continue - and we mustn't assist in the 'papering over the cracks' which is going on in most of the media now.

Post by myrt on Dec 3, 2010 14:11:48 GMT

I completely agree with you, Hwinpp!

Although I was just reading in the Guardian newspaper that there are suggestions now that the leaks about China's changing relationship to North Korea was done deliberately by the US government! Ho hum.... it's a Mad World and our Masters are not exactly the most trustworthy and honourable people in it....

Post by kerouac2 on Dec 3, 2010 14:32:47 GMT

It should also be pointed out that anybody who has been spied on will have the entire contents of the file about him or her published by Wikileaks as well -- bank statements, phone listings and all intimate details. The scandal sheets are already warming up the presses.

Post by fumobici on Dec 3, 2010 16:56:18 GMT

It should also be pointed out that anybody who has been spied on will have the entire contents of the file about him or her published by Wikileaks as well -- bank statements, phone listings and all intimate details. The scandal sheets are already warming up the presses.

My understanding is that the leaks are pretty extensively redacted to remove stuff like that where it doesn't add actual insight into policy.

Post by kerouac2 on Dec 3, 2010 18:47:52 GMT

A "heavier hand" is not enough. Do you think that they are qualified to decide if they should remove the name of a Peruvian businessman or a Mauritanian politician from the various documents? The whole world does not turn around US-Afghanistan relations, believe it or not. And they have documents about every country in the world.

Post by fumobici on Dec 4, 2010 0:17:28 GMT

The redaction needn't be perfect or even close. And of course WikiLeaks has asked the US DoD to assist in the redaction effort, an opportunity they declined to participate in. Of course there are downsides. The relevant question to me seems to be whether the downsides outweigh the upsides of the imperfectly redacted leaks, which of course is a subjective judgment. I don't think it's even a close call- the potential good far outweighs the potential harm.

Secrecy is insidious in its internal logic. The temptation to use it not as a legitimate security tool but as a means of controlling the flow of information for the purpose of either distorting perceptions ad hoc or to pursue policy agendas that could never be justified in the daylight so to speak or to simply use it to conceal bad behavior is too great. And human nature being what it is, if allowed it will also inevitably be employed to conceal all manner of misdeeds and to pursue nefarious personal agendas. And as the circle of secrecy expands, as it has and will unchecked, the potential harms and abuses grow exponentially. By its very nature secrecy operates with no effective oversight- and the body of secret knowledge will grow as the shadow policy debate propagates internally, expanding to every policy question based on data withheld from public scrutiny. There is no possible way for a democratic institution to function as designed when huge amounts of critical information are withheld from public view.

It is also worth considering that all the material leaked is low on the secrecy classification hierarchy and can be accessed by literally thousands of individuals with the proper clearances. Given this it would be naive in the extreme I think to suppose that most if not all of the interested parties- including states both hostile and friendly- don't already have ready access to most if not all of the leaked information through back channels. Thus the vast majority of the operational diplomatic downsides of the airing of this information exist whether these leaks become public or not.

Having an actual functioning democracy under the control of an effectively informed electorate is massively more important than whatever ephemeral embarrassments may result from the public dissemination of these documents. The expanding circle of secrecy threatens the foundations of the democratic process and I see no other remedy than copious embarrassing daylight shone into the dark corners where policy is formulated and implemented in secrecy.

Post by myrt on Dec 4, 2010 9:27:21 GMT

I don't see why, K2 - demonstrably there is no such thing as transparently democratic institutions. The wikileaks operations working here seem to be a team of very dedicated people with a figurehead prepared to put his head up above the parapet.If the Freedom of Information ethos worked properly this entire phenomenon would be unnecessary and irrelevant. Obviously there are occasions when things are best kept under wraps - both in terms of national security and danger to individuals - but these present leaks are really just exposing the absurdity of the way 'diplomacy' functions and the ever present paranoia in the backroom corridors of power.'Freedom of speech', 'Freedom of Information' and the assumption that 'Democracy' IS the best way to run the world are terms bandied about by our political classes when they want political advancement but they carry responsibilites and expectations. Those engaged in legitimately secret or nefarious activities seem to believe they have immunity under the cloak of diplomacy..that should not the case. It does no harm, in the long term, to remind us all that we are all collectively responsible for the activities of those we elect. And that those we do not elect are also ever present and pulling the strings.......And, in my humble opinion, the shriekings and clamour going on atm calling for Assange's arrest and subsequent trial for Treason are absolutely ludicrous......but the fact that they are being taken seriously is even worse - bizarre, extremist and very very scary......

Post by bixaorellana on Dec 4, 2010 14:47:53 GMT

Secrecy is insidious in its internal logic. The temptation to use it not as a legitimate security tool but as a means of controlling the flow of information for the purpose of either distorting perceptions ad hoc or to pursue policy agendas that could never be justified in the daylight so to speak or to simply use it to conceal bad behavior is too great.

We all know that most of what we read in order to form our voting decisions is really spin or pellets fed us with press releases from the powers-that-be. And there are routine release of previously hidden information with the public acting duly shocked that there were behind the scenes machinations.

It is also worth considering that all the material leaked is low on the secrecy classification hierarchy and can be accessed by literally thousands of individuals with the proper clearances.

Precisely. It's possible that Manning signed some document wherein he vowed not to release any information available to him. However, what might happen to him if prosecuted and found guilty seems like using a howitzer to kill a house fly. Further, as Myrt says:

Having an actual functioning democracy under the control of an effectively informed electorate is massively more important than whatever ephemeral embarrassments may result from the public dissemination of these documents.

It does no harm, in the long term, to remind us all that we are all collectively responsible for the activities of those we elect. And that those we do not elect are also ever present and pulling the strings.......

Post by fumobici on Dec 4, 2010 15:24:42 GMT

The following although more general in topic echoes many of my own thoughts on tendencies of bureaucracy when combined with unaccountability. Warning: written by an artists' collective:

This deconstruction of the binary of personal freedom and creativity vs. bureaucracy is further complicated in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the birth of bureaucracy as a political system from British Imperialism and pan-Germanic and pan-Slavic tendencies in Europe and leading up to the ultimate triumph of bureaucracy under the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. This specific historical context gave, according to Arendt, a special character to bureaucracy as a method of governance. First, Bureaucrats embody power without transparency and accountability, and since they “are not supposed to have general ideas about political matters” represent a form of power divorced from ethical deliberation or a negotiation of different positions.[3] Motivated by the expansionist aspirations of the empire rather than by a vision of just and stable rule, the space between the individual who holds power and the state vanishes: “no matter what individual qualities or defects a man may have, once he has entered the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion”.[4] Identifying himself with the very drive of history, whether successful or not, the bureaucrat conceals his actions behind the vague and supposedly natural movement of historical forces. Thus, the bureaucrat occupies an invisible place at the very heart of history and, at the same time, outside of historical memory.

The second characterisation of imperial bureaucracy in Arendt’s analysis derives from the relationship between bureaucratic management and the law. “Legally, government by bureaucracy is government by decree, and this means that power, which in constitutional government only enforces the law, becomes the direct source of all legislation.”[5] The bureaucratic decree cannot be identified with any one particular legislator or be open to scrutiny from authority outside the administration. Furthermore, writes Ardent, “The administrator considers the law to be powerless because it is by definition separated from its application. The decree, on the other hand, does not exist at all except if and when it is applied”.[6] Rejecting the slowness of deliberation before a law has been agreed upon and its interpretation under the legal system, the bureaucrat unifies law and action. The space between the universal aspirations of the law, to apply to all who fall under its jurisdiction without prejudice and the particular uniqueness of each case is annulled by the specific operation of the decree which, in a tautological move, draws its power and legitimacy not from a law preceding it but from its very moment of application.

Post by cheerypeabrain on Dec 4, 2010 20:13:54 GMT

I love the Guardian ;D...

I do, however wonder about the people we're trusting with running the world. Transparency and honest government must be preferable to 'behind closed doors' diplomacy. I know that I'm being naiive here...hoping that those in high office both deserve to be there and are the best people for the job.

Post by lagatta on Dec 4, 2010 23:37:15 GMT

Myrt, I'm proud of the Guardian too, and certainly want no harm to come to Assange (I'm reserving judgement about the sexual assault case - innocent until proven guilty, but I've known heroic people who could be heels in their private lives) - but like Kerouac, I do have a few qualms. Not about fighting for transparency in the sense of Glasnost, but can negotiations really be entirely open and transparent? I'm saying that from experience working in the background during labour-management negotiations, and other negotiations I've interpreted for.

Honesty seems to me to be a slightly different matter from constant transparency.

Post by lagatta on Dec 5, 2010 0:07:01 GMT

kerouac, one thing I did find responsible on the part of Wikileaks was that they did not release the raw cables but sent them to reputable media, which presumably would redact (as I've learnt one says now in English - rédaction and even in English to redact have always referred more to the editor's craft to my old eyes) names and data about innocent people who could face physical harm.

I have no qualms about the disgrace of a German government member exposed as a US mole. Yes, all governments spy on friendly countries, but he (Helmut somebody?) was responsible to the German people who elected him.

Wondering how Berlusconi reacted to being called feckless. He probably speaks some English (I have no idea, have always heard him in Italian) but not fluently: "I'm not feckless, I feck every day! The younger the better!"

Post by kerouac2 on Dec 5, 2010 0:16:08 GMT

Post by lagatta on Dec 5, 2010 0:28:54 GMT

In general, I agree with you, but the media in question do have the resources - journalistic and legal - to ensure the protection of innocent people and sources in countries where they would face physical harm. I think that is very important indeed.

Post by myrt on Dec 5, 2010 8:48:19 GMT

Wondering how Berlusconi reacted to being called feckless. He probably speaks some English (I have no idea, have always heard him in Italian) but not fluently: "I'm not feckless, I feck every day! The younger the better!"

Well, that made me laugh, Lagatta! Nice to start the day with a giggle! ;D

I don't think it's the whistleblowers place to suggest any other systems, K2. The systems currently are in place, and will work I expect, if those following them make the effort to be honourable and transparent in their modus operandi. The application and expectation of a certain level of truth and tact are surely not too much to ask from our leaders, dilpomats and bureaucrats.....or is that naive? Personally I don't think it's really that impossible..

Post by kerouac2 on Dec 6, 2010 13:28:00 GMT

I was reading that the United States will change the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan after the Wikileaks revelation that he made numerous reports about corruption in the Afghan regime, as well as a very negative analysis of President Karzai.

This pretty much ensures that the next American ambassador will be a lot more complacent and will find it preferable to ignore the corruption if he wants to keep his job, thanks to Wikileaks.